I spent this week in Washington DC, focusing on policy and legislation. Comptel held its policy summit on Tuesday, and I lobbied in the House and Senate on Wednesday. Capping off the week, today the FCC voted for strong open Internet rules which will protect consumers from unreasonable behavior by carriers.

It is important to draw the distinction between regulation of the Internet, and regulation of carriers. The FCC’s order will disallow carriers from discriminating against sources of traffic that their customers choose to access via the Internet. This is common carriage at its core, and as a carrier, I am supportive of being regulated as a common carrier by the FCC.

I don’t believe we would have gotten here if the access marketplace in the US was truly competitive. Regulation became necessary because consumers have so few choices for their access to the Internet. If consumers could easily choose from many carriers, I believe this would have prevented the issues we have seen.

I take some responsibility for this marketplace failure, and I know that we need to work to deliver more consumers a great competitive choice from Sonic. We are working hard to expand our reach, to improve performance and to increase the value of our service. We will continue that mission with renewed vigor in 2015. Please tell a friend about Sonic today.

Sonic has completed Gigabit Fiber Internet construction in the business park network at the Sonoma County Airport, and last week began to activate new Gigabit business customers.

The new network spans nine miles, passes hundreds of businesses, lighting over 200 buildings. Some of these locations only had T1 (1.5Mbps) services available prior to the build-out of Sonic Gigabit Fiber Internet.

This is Sonic’s second completed business park fiber build-out, after the Corporate Center park in Southwest Santa Rosa which was completed last year. Next up, construction is underway to serve businesses in Petaluma off North McDowell and the Redwood business park.

The business Gigabit Fiber Internet product offers Gigabit (1000Mbps) Internet access plus Hosted PBX to the desktop; a complete business communications suite. Pricing is $40 per employee or desk per month for Gigabit Internet access, cloud phone service and unlimited nationwide calling. Custom solutions are also available including building interconnection for campus WANs, SIP trunking, PRI and POTS.

Business fiber services are part of Sonic’s overall fiber initiatives, and support the expansion of network capacity and backbone throughout our regional footprint.

There are a number of threats to the Internet as a system for innovation, commerce and education today. They include net neutrality, the price of Internet access in America, performance, rural availability and privacy.

But none of these are the root issue, they’re just symptoms.

The root cause of all of these symptoms is a disease: a lack of competition for consumer Internet access.

Lets call it like it is: in most of America, we’ve got a broadband duopoly at best. And it’s simple economic theory and best-practice capitalism that in an unregulated near-monopoly, you will see manifestations of policies, practices and behaviors that are not always customer friendly.

If we accept that high speed Internet access is essential for modern life, the fact that we need a set of controls that assure that an entrenched operator won’t use their captive audience in an unreasonable way shouldn’t come as a surprise.

But policies on neutrality can only fix one symptom of America’s ailment. They won’t help with the issues like price, speed, rural access or privacy practices.

The real cure is an outbreak of competitive Internet access.

But in 2004, the FCC took steps to limit competition, turning away from key provisions of the 1996 Telecom Act. They set aside unbundling requirements which serve as a key bridge for competitive carriers. By circumventing Congress this way, the Bush-appointed Chairman of the FCC was able to turn back a competitive tide, creating an intentional duopoly on Internet access in the US.

In our Triennial Review Order, we recognized the marketplace realities of robust broadband competition and increasing competition from intermodal sources, and thus eliminated most unbundling requirements for broadband architectures serving the mass market

(“Robust broadband competition?” Really??)

While neutrality is the topic of the day, the real fix is to reinvigorate competitive Internet access in America. Competitive access in Europe supported by legislation similar to The 1996 Act has resulted in lower costs for consumers and far more choices in Europe. What Michael Powell decided to do hasn’t worked out as well for Americans.

Today’s FCC should return to the roots of the Telecom Act, and reinforce the unbundling requirements, assuring that they are again technology neutral. This will create an investment ladder to facilities for competitive carriers, opening access to build out and serve areas that are beyond our reach today.

I call on the FCC to reconsider the decisions of that past era, and to take steps to reintroduce UNE-L (unbunded network element: loop) requirements, including access to available dark fiber, which is a critical backhaul component for competitive carriers. Copper unbundling is only fully viable when the middle mile fiber isn’t missing from the equation.

ps: Former FCC Chairman Michael Powell is now a lobbyist for the National Cable & Telecom Association. The Cable-company members of that association are the “robust” competition from “intermodal” (that’s cable) sources referenced above, and also provided a nice soft landing for a former FCC Chairman. How often does a regulator get the chance to create a monopoly, then go work for it? Too often.

On Monday, President Barack Obama announced his plan to protect net neutrality, asking the FCC to prevent Internet providers and cable companies from blocking or limiting access to websites. Obama said,

“They should make it clear … Internet providers have a legal obligation not to block or limit your access to a website,” he said Monday. “Cable companies can’t decide which online stores you can shop at, or which streaming services you can use, and they can’t let any company pay for priority over competitors.”

In a marketplace dominated by a few carriers, scarcity and tolls have become the new normal. This choice puts the the health of the Internet as an ecosystem for innovation, economic growth and education at risk. Consumers should not become captive pawns in a game to extract more value from the Internet as a whole.

Sonic continues to adhere to the net neutrality practices implemented since its founding in 1994:

We don’t disadvantage any source or type of traffic.

There are no per-circuit speed tiers and no usage caps.

We host content delivery equipment as close to our customers as possible.

When you use Sonic as your Internet Access Provider, we work hard to guard your privacy. Sonic instituted strong privacy practices when the company was founded nearly 20 years ago. We’ve had your back all these years.

Netflix has begun paying a fee to deliver their site’s content to Comcast and Verizon Internet customers who want to access it. This is in addition to the fee which Comcast and Verizon customers themselves pay to access “The Internet”, which of course includes Netflix. The customers pay for Internet access, but the two carriers caused or allowed congestion on their networks in order to limit Netflix’s ability to deliver to their mutual customers.

The fix? A payment from Netflix to both Comcast and Verizon to assure that their traffic makes it to the end-user. Call it “protection”, if you’d like.

The FCC appears to be saying that this is okay, despite this sort of thing being the basis for network neutrality, the principal that all traffic should be treated equally and without discrimination. Net neutrality is dead.

Here at Sonic, we appreciate the Internet. The Internet is why you subscribe, and we are happy to be your choice to deliver a fast, friendly and reliable conduit to access the Internet sites and services that you want. While we do have a lovely home page and we provide a nice array of extras, we understand that the reason you subscribe is to access the Internet. (Thanks, Internet, for being awesome!)

So, we don’t disadvantage any source or type of traffic. Sonic Fusion service has no speed tiers and no usage caps. We deliver the fastest and most consistent performance possible at your location, regardless of the what you are downloading from the Internet.

We are also happy to host content delivery equipment as close to our customers as possible. By partnering with large content sources, we save money on Internet transit while delivering the best performance to our members.

At Sonic, we believe that this is not only the right thing to do, it is also a competitive advantage. (Please tell a friend!)

Protection of customer privacy is one of our core values at Sonic.net. We seek to provide as much transparency as possible regarding legal processes and customer privacy, so in furtherance of those efforts, we are releasing our third annual Transparency Report.

This year we saw far fewer civil subpoenas than 2012, with just one in 2013 compared with nine each in 2011 and 2012. Law enforcement subpoena activity increased in 2013, but Sonic.net’s membership is also increasing so it is challenging to make a direct comparison between the years. One DMCA content takedown notice was received and complied with. (Content takedowns are less common for Sonic.net because we primarily provide Internet access, and hosting is not a very large part of our business.)

We have also made one update to our Sonic.net Legal Process Policy document. The update makes clearer our policies by replacing “criminal subpoena” with “criminal legal process” in order to assure that we cover all possible forms of legal process.

Finally, we have now begun tracking law enforcement orders which are subsequently withdrawn before customer information is provided. We expect to release information in our 2014 report which includes more details about these situations.

Internet and telephone service providers have a great responsibility both to protect their law-abiding customers and the public. We continually work to achieve both of these goals.

Please share! We have expanded again, and Sonic.net’s broadband and telephone services are now available throughout much of the LA region.

Sonic’s Fusion service offers residential customers in the LA region a competitive broadband and telephone choice. Fusion includes unlimited land line telephone service plus uncapped and unlimited broadband for just $39.95 monthly.

For business customers, FlexLink Ethernet and FlexLink Hosted PBX offer businesses broadband Internet access plus telephone services using fast Ethernet technology. Offering up to 100Mbps of symmetric speed, FlexLink services can be deployed in as little as three weeks for business customers. Hosted PBX service delivers a modern alternative to expensive premise based business telephone systems, with more flexibility and substantial cost savings. Traditional PRI and analog voice services are also available.

If your business is located anywhere in the LA area, contact us to learn more.

In recognition of the massive natural disaster affecting the Philippines, all calls to the country will be free for the month of November. If you have family or friends in this region, we hope for the best for them. We hope that we are able to help you stay connected, with a waiver of all costs for this month.

For those seeking loved ones in the region, Google has activated their Person Finder, a resource for those displaced to register themselves, and for those searching to find and connect. Visit the Typhoon Yolanda person finder.

In an ongoing effort to better secure our member’s communications, we have recently added support for encryption of inbound email to Sonic.net email addresses. Using Transport Layer Security (TLS), we are now negotiating encryption of email in transit with remote mail servers which support this protocol.

From our ops team’s notification: “… This (TLS) allows the session between the connecting server and our’s to be fully encrypted preventing messages from being available “on the wire” in clear text. Our outbound servers have supported this kind of encryption when sending mail to destinations that support it for more than a decade. At this time it looks like approximately 15-20% of inbound email is encrypted in transit.”

To test a mail server for encryption security, you can use CheckTLS.com, this will allow you to see if email from a correspondent at another email service provider will be likely to be encrypted.

Internet privacy is important to us, and we continue to improve our services to deliver the best privacy protection we can to our members.